Who Reviews Comic Book Review Eleventh Doctor Volume 3 - Conversion

Tony’s converted.

Mad Chinese dragon-style mood-dogs. David Bowie as a Tardis traveller (or near as dammit). A regenerated Uber-Bessie. Robert ‘sold his soul to the Devil’ Johnson. A black, female Eleventh Doctor. A companion made of what looks like Silly Putty. An entity that can give you whatever you desire. The theme park of death. A war between two races rapt in wonder. The Doctor turning evil. World of the happy smiley zombie people.

If you’re just joining us in the adventures of the Eleventh Doctor in Titan Comics, that’s just a quick summary of some of the stuff you’ve already missed.

About that whole ‘book early to avoid disappointment’ thing.

Fortunately of course, Titan’s a full-service bunch of groovers, and when enough issues of a Doctor Who comic have been released and you’ve either bought them or somehow missed them, the company releases a collected edition. So you can still catch all the mood-dog, David Bowie, Robert Johnson Uber-Bessie, Evil Doctor, female Doctor Silly Putty theme park of happy smiley zombie people death action in Volumes 1 and 2 of the collected editions of the Eleventh Doctor comic-book.

And now there’s another one.

Bet you’d like to know what’s in that one, wouldn’t you?

Let’s see – it’s difficult to pick a headline, really. God-fearing, vision-showing Cyber-armies? The first Christian Roman Emperor, and why he changed the world? A self-writing story-virus? The Tardis splitting in four? The Tardis locking the Doctor out and disappearing into time and space. The Doctor’s mother popping back to remonstrate with her errant son?

All that and more is here in Conversion, the third collected edition of Eleventh Doctor comic-books, and the one that finally, no, really this time, puts the cork in the bottle of the ServeYouInc storyline that took so gorgeously long and twisty a path to tell, you could mistake it for a Moffat season of hardcore Matt Smithery.

In fact it’s no exaggeration to say that you might well gain a clearer appreciation for all the subtlety and nuance of the Matt Smith Doctor from reading these comic-books than you’d get from rewatching his on-screen seasons. The whole reality of the tireless work he put in during his time in the Tardis is somehow clearer in this two-dimensional format than it is on-screen, the strands less cluttered and yet equally or sometimes more rewarding, frenetic, and powerful. Perhaps that’s the ultimate accolade: You’ll know and understand the Eleventh Doctor better reading these comic-books.

The storyline here involves quite a lot of travelling through space chasing something enigmatically called The Entity, in the intimate company of its detached brain (did we mention the comic-books are able to take more creative risks than the on-screen show, being limited only by the imagination of writers and artists?). Along with someone who’s David Bowie in all but lawsuit and a library assistant from Hackney, London. The main thrust of the story involves a Doctor trying to recover from an episode of selfishness, and the struggle of those around him to try and trust the bow-tie wearing young professor of time and space again. The most action-packed episodes include an enormous Cyber-invasion of the Earth, with Cybermen enhanced by the power to show you the things you want most in all the world. That’s where we meet Constantine the Eventually Great, as he becomes both a Christian and the undisputed Emperor of Rome. The Doctor’s response to that threat is what gives us the idea of there being a bunch of Cybermen somewhere in the galaxy fervently believing in a Cyber-God (Oh please let that be a future on-screen story), but it’s also another black mark of mistrust for Captain UltraChin, and it’s an action that makes the Tardis run off and leave him to think about his actions, stranded in fourth century Rome, while another of his friends is in mortal danger and apparently beyond his help.

The writing, from Al Ewing and Rob Williams, is almost ridiculously good. Honestly, you’ll read it and your mouth will drop open, as you ask why they don’t write for the on-screen Who. Certainly, knowing what we know about the on-screen version, these two have got an impeccable ear for Matt Smith’s Doctor, because his lines are crafted in such a way that there isn’t one of them that goes into your head without a Smithian voice track. Meanwhile, Smith’s Doctor is clearly eminently drawable, beyond ‘Big chin, floppy hair,’ because Simon Fraser, Boo Cook and Warren Pleece render him in all his moods in very recognisable ways here – again, reading this comic-book will help you identify everything you know about Matt Smith’s Doctor but had never particularly thought about – there’s the bandy-legged Chaplin walk, there’s the pointy-finger, there’s the considering face, there’s the rage, there’s the suddenly intent stare, there’s the collapsed-souffle face of realisation that something bad is happening – all nailed into two dimensions for you, and accessible in a much more immediate, intelligible way: the comic-books allow you to recognise these things as ‘things’ – parts of the Eleventh Doctor’s make-up, where on screen, they can sometimes pass you by as part of stories.

In particular, apart from the Cyber-story, look out for Chapter 11 here, called Four Dimensions. This allows Boo Cook on artwork and Hi-Fi on colour to really show off their skills, with pages split beyond the normal panel-structure, and sections delivered in monochromes, to indicate four separate environments. Beautiful, evocative stuff. There’s beauty of another kind too in later panels of the Doctor’s sadness and contrition, which takes the story full circle to when Alice Obiefune first met the Doctor, as he crashed colour into her ash-grey life of mourning for her mother. She’s able here to repay the favour when he loses the Tardis (to his mother – we mentioned that, right?), and feels entirely unable to move forward again. If the ultimate test of a companion is the effect they have on the Time Lord, then all three of the members of this Tardis team have done excellent work – there are plenty of occasions throughout the long story arc of ServeYouInc where they have saved the Doctor in some way or other, but this last one from Alice is particularly poignant, galvanising the Doctor for a moment of older man self-definition and surety, defeating his own self-doubts and guilt with the help of her belief in him.

Conversion is a must-have for Collected Issue fans, but it’s also pretty special if you’ve been collecting the issues one by one – not only is there a sense of more permanence having the collected issues on your shelf, but (and this was a delicious surprise), you also get the ‘Free Comic Book Day’ release, Give Free Or Die, which you’ll have missed if (like us) you were simply going issue by issue.

So update your complete collection – get Conversion today.

Who Reviews Gaze of the Medusa Part 3 Comic Book Review by Tony J Fyler

Tony puts the kettle on and settles in for a chatty issue.

Ah, episode 3.

Throughout the history of on-screen Doctor Who, episode 3 has always been something of an action graveyard. A tense action graveyard, to be sure, an informative  action graveyard, certainly – the role of the third episode is usually to give us all the information we need for a conclusion – with the threat having been built and the Doctor’s involvement being contrived in the first two parts, and the solution coming in the final episode, part 3 has been the episode where we’ve hung about, waiting for things to happen, or learning about all the things that could happen – the things that make the threat scary, and the things that begin to give us an inkling of how the threat will eventually be understood, battled and defeated.

Part 3 of Gaze of the Medusa pretty much sticks to this tried and tested formula – having separated our heroes into two groups, both in some way having temporarily escaped the attentions of the veiled Lady Carstairs, we learn more about the fate of those who have ended up as (presumably living) statues in her house as Professor Odysseus and Sarah-Jane are catapulted back to roughly the sixth century BC, while the Doctor and Odysseus’ daughter, Athena have run away with the Lamp of Chronos, a troublesome MacGuffin around which most of the drama of the story so far has revolved.

We learn the nature of the giant one-eyed gibberish-speaking chaps in top hats who have been somehow subjugated by Lady Carstairs (there’s a groan waiting for you when you learn their name), and discover that they have something in the way of a special skill. But, perhaps more worryingly, one of them has been taken back in time with the Professor and Sarah-Jane, and, when it menaces them, Odysseus appears to give it an order in its own gibberish-tongue, which makes it run away. That never bodes well in episode 3.

The Sarah-Jane and Odysseus arc is mainly used here to fill Sarah-Jane in on Athena, and to build the tension to what is – with the best will in the world – a very predictable cliff-hanger. To be absolutely fair, Sarah-Jane herself even predicts the cliff-hanger here, writers Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby treating the reader with respect and not forgetting they’ll have read previous issues. The characterisation of Sarah-Jane through her dialogue here is excellent, with a real Elisabeth Sladen tone to it: she stops Odysseus from swigging from his hip-flask, asks questions about Athena and the man with whom she’s involved, and makes some salient points about the nature of the danger they’re in.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Athena arc is classic Baker ‘alien Tom-foolery,’ revealing that the Lamp of Chronos is someone’s attempt to copy Time Lord technology, rooting about in pockets and cupboard to find gizmos that will enable the plot to move forward without, in actual fact moving it forward just yet, and dismissing things that are probably quite important with an airy lack of concern – on the question of how the lamp comes to be where it is, he says ‘people lose things all the time, only for them to turn up in the strangest places. I only recently realized I seem to have mislaid the Tardis's art gallery sometime in the last hundred years or so. I'm sure it'll turn up, eventually.’

Between them, the arcs allow us just enough new information to start pulling some threads together and perhaps just wonder if our heroes are fighting on the right side – a stray line of Athena’s, added to her father’s apparent command of one-eyed-dude gibberish, makes us reassess everything we know, and while the cliff-hanger is heavily foreshadowed, it allows us to move on in issue #4 with the ‘Doctor arriving to save the day’ portion of the story quickly.

There’s every likelihood that the story’s about to get more complicated than it at first appeared, and issue #3 sets that up neatly and without too heavy a hand, while making sure we’re pretty well primed for it if and when it comes.

The artwork in this issue faces a handful of challenges – most notably the fact that the story here is mostly ‘stand around talking’ fare, rather than ‘battle for the fate of the universe’ material. Nevertheless, Brian Williamson delivers all the elements required with a practiced hand – as we’ve mentioned before, there’s a degree of legend-printing in this first comic-book outing for the Fourth Doctor and Sarah-Jane, but when you have legends of that quality, there’s no real bad in that. Williamson’s Fourth Doctor is effective, matching the quality of the visuals to the voice that Rennie and Beeby give him, and likewise, it’s good to see Sarah-Jane reliably rendered in these issues – it helps us buy into the relativity of our favourite show to see her again, doing the things that Sarah-Jane would. The other characters too have a coherence to them, despite being, as everyone is in this story, very distinctly ‘drawn’ rather than photo-believable. Williamson pitches his style towards the gothic end of the Fourth Doctor spectrum, and creates a world that feels comfortable for the Fourth Doctor, albeit later than what we know as Sarah-Jane’s time.

If there’s a nit to pick with the art in this issue, it’s with the final page, and the reveal of the Medusa itself, which, compared to some recent Titan Who comic-books, doesn’t punch with the impact we’ve come to expect. That said, the artwork and colourwork (from Hi-Fi) throughout the rest of the issue is solid and, particularly in terms of the colourwork, brings occasional bolts of surprise, including a panel showing the use of a MacGuffin to defeat a villain, and several ‘shots’ of the Lamp of Chronos in some kind of action.

So, one to get? Well, to a certain extent, that’s a no-brainer – it’s the Fourth Doctor and Sarah-Jane, back in action! Admittedly the ‘action’ they’re back in is a little muted here, as they take to explaining things and asking questions without in fact actually getting very far. But still, Rennie, Beeby, Williamson and Hi-Fi do enough to justify parting you with your money. Just bear in mind that this is an episode 3 issue, and it will still give you lots to ponder over, revel in and be grateful for.

Who Reviews The Third Doctor Issue 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s in a nostalgic mood.

D’you remember when you first became a Who-fan?

D’you remember the rush of excitement of suddenly being a witness to this wonderful world, this eccentric world with the benevolent alien and his time travelling police box. D’you remember the urgent, evangelistic need to tell your friends about the great new thing you’d discovered, while they languished in the outside world, being thrilled by only ordinary superheroes?

That’s the feeling the Third Doctor comic-book series brings back to life – sure, it’s nostalgic, but it’s nostalgic in a way that feels fresh and bright, with a pace that reminds you of the best of the Third Doctor’s on-screen adventures, but ramped up to a realism that wouldn’t be out of place in the days of Kate Stewart’s UNIT. The Third Doctor comic-book series makes you want to tell people about it to make sure they don’t miss out, because not reading it is missing out by definition.

At the end of issue # 2, the Doctor had gone on a magical mystery tour into Jo Grant’s subconscious, after she’d been infected by the micro-machines that are the centre of the nominal story-arc across these issues. The joy of that issue was in the pure, unclouded simplicity of Jo’s psyche, and the hippie dippy artwork that symbolised her mind. Meanwhile in the material world, the Brigadier and his uninvited guest could only look on as both the Doctor and Jo glowed blue, almost entirely infested with the micro-machines.

We pick up the story with Jo rescuing the Doctor in a way that’s so thoroughly true to the character it gains writer Paul Cornell some Seventies Who bonus points, and leads to a confrontation that couldn’t be more Pertwee if it came with a lisp and a yellow roadster, the Doctor trying to bridge the gulf of understanding between the humans and the organised mind of the micro-machines, using his own experience as an alien among the humans to foster a connection, his own sense of fear, and loneliness, and loss to reach out to the machines. Cornell loads up Seventies bonus points by the bucketful as he gives Jo a sad and angry speech in response to that, and then evaporates the hurt the Doctor has caused her in a thoroughly Pertweean way.

Safely back in the material world, there’s more UNIT than you can shake a tissue compression eliminator at – cunning disguises, Venusian Aikido, Yates and Benton, discussing both the likelihood of dating Jo and the necessity of keeping a vivid imagination while on active duty in the UNIT. There’s another satisfying nod to the future of the Taskforce too, as a very particular scientific soldier feeds them information that sounds mad, and so is part of the day-to-day reality of UNIT. But just when you think this might be one of those third instalments that acts mostly as a bridge between acts one and two, Cornell goes and gives you a reveal that flips everything you’ve thought you’ve known so far on its head. It’s a not so much a nod back to the Sixties as a full theatrical bow to an artistic conceit that worked surprisingly well on-screen. Here, that conceit is turned around, and works just as well that way too, giving us a cliff-hanger you won’t see coming.

Artwise, Christopher Jones matches Cornell beat for beat – nowhere near as easy a task as this single line makes it sound - giving us bold construction, impressive, fluid detail, and in the regulars of the day, highly recognisable features and characteristics. The backgrounds are UNIT-functional, but manage never to be dull, never ‘just’ backgrounds, and in particular during the Third Doctor’s confrontation with the micro-machines in Jo’s mind, Jones gives us something familiar but puts it to a brisk new use. There’s praise to spare for Hi-Fi on colourwork here too, adding some real Seventies ‘Decade That Style Forgot’ flair to Jo’s mindscape and some bold colour-based delineations to the UNIT sequences.

What’s perhaps most impressive, artistically, is that between them, Jones and Hi-Fi make the issue’s cliff-hanger reveal work. It worked on-screen through the strength of a particular performance, but to render that performance entirely believable in a single page-long panel in a comic-book is a different skill again, and one that Jones and Hi-Fi use to pull off a mouth-dropping, eyebrow-raising ending to this issue.

You can stare at The Third Doctor #3 as long as you like, try and tackle it from whichever way appeals to you – if you’re looking for faults, you’re on a hiding to nothing. The Seventies nostalgia is there, the updated pace is there, the emotional beats of familiar characters are there (and in a couple of cases, turned slightly up from the TV), the nods forward, the nods back, and most importantly the balance are all in place to make The Third Doctor mini-series one of those stand-outs in your mind, one of those stories in your Who collection that you watch again and again for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of the experience. It’s a Terror of the Autons, Three Doctors, Time Warrior feeling. It makes you smile all the way through.

Grab your copy of The Third Doctor #3 today – and start saving your pennies for the collected version too. That, like a blu-ray Power of the Daleks, will be worth buying again, even though you’ve been getting it episode by episode. It’s that good.